


In Sickness and in Health

by unfolded73



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Married Life, background Stevie Budd, background alexis/ted, background moira/johnny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 02:56:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20251024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfolded73/pseuds/unfolded73
Summary: When Johnny is rushed to the hospital with more than just heartburn, Patrick has to try to hold David and the rest of the Roses together.





	In Sickness and in Health

**Author's Note:**

> I promise, no permanent angst in this fic, don't worry! Set in some future time after David and Patrick are married. Assumes Alexis and Ted are still together -- not necessarily my headcanon but it worked for this. Thanks to @startswithhope for giving this a read-through and for the title!

He should have known something was wrong when he saw Ted’s name pop up on his phone’s lock screen. Patrick and Ted were friendly with each other in the way that the partners of siblings often are, friendly but not really friends. They were on a family group text chain together, one that was often dominated by arguments between David and Alexis or David and Moira over the logistics of everyday family life. But he and Ted did not call each other. He and Ted had never called each other.

“Hey, Ted, what’s up?”

Ted sounded out of breath. “Patrick, get David and get to Elmdale Hospital. It’s Mr. Rose.”

Patrick felt his heartbeat accelerate, a rushing sensation in his head and extremities: fight or flight. “Is he okay?” He was already moving out from behind the counter toward the back of the store, where their new sales associate Bethany was reorganizing some of the inventory, probably to David’s eventual annoyance.

“Not sure yet. Moira called Alexis but she wasn’t… I couldn’t make sense of a lot of what she was saying.”

“Yeah.” He could imagine what that phone call must have been like, although oddly Moira’s hysterics could fall away in the more dire of circumstances. He’d experienced it first hand when he’d been hit in the face by a line drive at one of his games last year (the quantity of blood had been disproportionate to the injury, but that hadn’t stopped Moira and David from freaking out in their own unique ways). The incident had left him with a hairline scar above his eyebrow that David had taken to running the pads of his fingers over during tender moments, and which Alexis assured him made him look ‘a tiny bit less like a puppy,’ a comment he tried not to be offended by. The point was, perhaps Moira being hysterical was a good sign.

“We just got on the highway so we’ll meet you there, okay?” Ted was saying.

“Okay. David’s on his way back from a pickup, so I’ll… we’ll leave as soon as we can. In the meantime, call me if you learn any more, okay?”

He pulled up David’s number on his phone, thumb hesitating over his husband’s name. Calling David and telling him that something might be terribly wrong with his father while he was driving their car seemed like a bad idea. Instead he busied himself ensuring that Bethany had instructions to handle everything at the store for the rest of the day by herself (not that she really needed them; she was young but eminently capable).

The bell announced David’s arrival about twenty minutes later, ostentatious sunglasses on his face and the handle of a cooler in each hand filled with Heather Warner’s prize cheeses. Bethany was ready to take the coolers, nodding surreptitiously to Patrick as he steered David into the storeroom before any customers could waylay him.

“David, you and I need to get to Elmdale Hospital, something’s happened with your father,” Patrick said, trying to just rip the band-aid off.

“_What?_ What happened?”

He put his hands on David’s biceps, trying to keep him calm just through the pressure of his touch. “I don’t know yet, but your mom is with him, and Ted and Alexis are probably almost there by now, so if we get on the road we should hear more news before too long, okay?”

David put his hands over his mouth, his flat gold rings on one hand and wedding band on the other winking in the light. “The store--”

“Bethany’s going to watch the store today, so you and I don’t have to worry about that.” Patrick kissed David’s cheek. “It might be nothing, so let’s not freak out yet, okay?”

He got David into the car and on the road after just a few minutes, trees rushing past on the narrow highway that led to Elmdale. “Dad had that heartburn thing before, remember?” David said after a while. “The day we got engaged.”

“Exactly, it might just be something like that. Alexis will call and we can have a laugh and turn around and head back home.”

Alexis called. No one laughed.

“They said it’s a heart attack,” she said, her voice coming out tinny and high-pitched from the speaker of David’s phone. Patrick’s car didn’t have bluetooth, something that David had brought up multiple times recently while they were beginning the process of shopping for a second car. Feeling an immediate surge of affection and worry for his husband, Patrick vowed to himself to make sure David got the bluetooth thing for the new car that he wanted. All of a sudden it seemed terribly important.

“Are they sure? Maybe--”

“Of course they’re sure, David.”

“Is he okay? Is he conscious?” David’s voice trembled, and Patrick reached out from the steering wheel to take hold of his hand. David squeezed his fingers, his wedding ring pressing into Patrick’s skin.

“Yeah, he was, but they’re getting him prepped for surgery now so we couldn’t see him much at all.”

“Surgery?” David squeezed his hand harder, and Patrick gritted his teeth against the discomfort of it. “What surgery?”

“A bypass, I think? I don’t…” He heard another voice, too low for him to make out the words, and then Alexis said, “A quadruple bypass, which Ted says is very common, and…” -- more muffled talking away from the microphone -- “... and has a very high rate of success.” 

After the phone call ended, David didn’t talk; he just stared straight ahead through the windshield as Patrick continued to drive one-handed and stole glances at him when he could spare them. “He’s gonna be okay, David.”

“You don’t know that.”

Patrick’s parents were nominally Christian, but they’d not attended church very often when he was growing up: Christmas and Easter and occasionally when his aunt guilted them into going with her. But that didn’t mean his parents didn’t believe in a higher power, and while Patrick had his doubts when he was younger, now if someone were to pin him down on the topic, he’d say he believed there was something. Some kind of guiding force in the universe, at least. Right now, he mustered all of that belief and he squeezed his husband’s hand and he said, “I believe it.”

David went straight over to his mother as soon as they entered the waiting room, leaving Patrick to accept a wobbly hug from Alexis, her perfume enveloping him in a floral cloud. She felt like a fragile bird, hollow-boned and vibrating with restless energy, and Patrick tried to communicate as much support as he could through the hug and a gentle pat on her back.

“You okay? Need anything?” he asked. Ted hovered nearby.

“No.” She pulled back and shot him a watery smile. “I’m just scared.”

“He’s gonna be fine,” Patrick said, calling on all of his acting skills to seem certain of what he was saying. “What happened?” he asked the group at large.

Stevie lifted her head from her hands. “He was up on a ladder cleaning the gutters at the motel again, which I’ve told him not to do, and I told him again today but he didn’t listen to me.”

David threw up his hands in exasperation. “You have multiple employees who can do that now.”

“I know that,” Stevie shot back. “Anyway, he’s lucky he didn’t fall off the top of that fucking ladder. I happened to be coming out of the office when he was climbing down, and right after his feet hit the ground, he collapsed. I called an ambulance as quickly as I could...” Her lip curled with fresh tears, and David pulled her into a hug, his flash of anger forgotten by them both.

Mrs. Rose was uncharacteristically silent, staring into the middle distance. Patrick knelt down in front of her and took her hand. “Moira? Is there anything I can get you? A tea, maybe?”

She shook her head. “No, Patrick.” Her voice was raspy. “Thank you, but I’m fine.” Her subdued affect worried him more than anything else had so far. Patrick pulled himself up into the chair at her side, continuing to hold her hand. Hand-holding seemed like all he was good for today, and he felt the lack of anything productive to do keenly. 

“I was only able to talk to him for a few minutes before they took him into surgery,” she said. “What if that’s the last thing I ever get to say to him?” She said it quietly, her normal, loud voice smothered under her fears.

“It won’t be. Bypass surgery is very routine.” Her hand felt tiny in his, the skin thin and papery over her knuckles. Suddenly this inevitable part of his and David’s future seemed too immediate: parents aging, getting sick, dying. It felt commonplace and ordinary and at the same time like too large a mass of grief to contemplate. He was overcome with a sudden compulsion to talk to his own father.

“And this morning I was complaining about the neighbor’s garbage cans. Maybe he went to the motel to get away from my grousing. If I hadn’t--”

“Moira, I’m sure that’s not it.” The Roses finally had their own house, and Patrick imagined that if Mr. Rose had survived those years sharing a single motel room with his wife, surely things were smooth sailing these days. Not that he was going to say that now. “There’s no sense in blaming yourself.”

She smiled and patted the top of his hand. “You’re a good boy, Patrick. Such a good husband for David, have I told you that?” Tears filled her eyes. “Appreciate every day of your lives together, dear, before one of you ends up on an operating table, life hanging in the balance!”

“Okay, Moira, okay.” Patrick found the dramatics oddly reassuring, like as long as Mrs. Rose was catastrophizing, nothing truly bad could happen. She was an inoculation against true tragedy. Continuing to hold her hand, Patrick settled into the hard, plastic chair to wait.

~*~

“Hey, I was wondering if I could get an update on Johnny Rose?” Patrick asked the nurse at the station. Her scrubs were cheery and pink with little ice cream cones on them. David would hate them, he thought.

“Are you family?”

Patrick hesitated for just a second before he remembered, _oh right. I_ am _officially family_. “I’m his son-in-law.”

“Just a moment, please.” She tapped on her keyboard for a minute, and Patrick stared at the Toronto Raptors sticker on the back of her computer monitor, his mind fixating on the fact that the dinosaur depicted in the drawing had claws sticking through its basketball shoes. The nurse cleared her throat and said, “He’s still in surgery.”

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Patrick said evenly, “I know, I was just hoping there was…” What? Did he think the surgeons took time away from their work to update the front desk on their progress? “I was hoping there was news. Sorry.”

The nurse gave him a kind smile. “No need to apologize. Tell your wife to hang in there.”

This was exactly the kind of thing that David would probably let go without a comment. David’s identity didn’t hinge on the gender of the person he was married to, and so he didn’t often care to correct people’s assumptions. But after all the years that Patrick had struggled with his own sexual identity and while he envied David’s lack of concern, he didn’t share it. “My husband, actually,” he said, picking up a couple of wrapped mints from the bowl on the desk.

“Sorry,” she said. “Your husband.”

Giving her a tight smile, Patrick made his way back to the waiting room. “No news,” he said, flopping down next to David and holding out one of the mints to him.

“It’s been a long time,” David said, ignoring the mint and rubbing his palms on the tops of his thighs.

“Heart surgery takes a while, babe.” Patrick stuck the mint in his shirt pocket and reached out and started to take David’s hand, but David stood up abruptly.

“Fuck, I hate hospitals,” he muttered. “Can we go get some air?”

“Of course.” 

They passed through the revolving door of the hospital’s main entrance. The front of the building was all glass, bringing an incongruously light and airy feel to the place. David came to a halt abruptly as soon as they were outside, as if he didn’t have any idea what to do now, so Patrick led him over to a large stone planter filled with flowers. Crossing his arms and leaning against it, Patrick tried to puzzle out what he could do to help David through the next few hours. 

“We could go get some food,” Patrick said.

David shook his head, fidgeting from one foot to another. “I’m not hungry.”

“Okay. We could just get some tea, though, or we could go for a walk--”

“I was always closer to Mom.”

Patrick could see it now that he was looking for it, the guilt etched into David’s expression. “David--”

“Dad’s the normal one of all of us, you know? He just stands there a lot of the time and absorbs our madness, and I used to actually find it irritating? Which I know is stupid. But when I was a teenager, I wanted to get a rise out of my parents.”

“That’s totally normal, babe--”

David didn’t appear to have heard him and continued talking. “I’d drag myself home from a rave, high out of my mind, and yeah -- most of the time neither of them noticed. They were too wrapped up in their own lives to pay attention to whether I was… anyway.”

After all their years together, Patrick knew something about what was going unsaid there. To pay attention to whether David was safe. To wonder if he was having sex way too young with the kind of people who liked to prey on kids like him -- wealthy and insecure and starved for affection.

But that didn’t seem to be the point of this particular speech of David’s, and Patrick kept his mouth shut. 

“Sometimes my mother would notice, though, and her anger was weirdly satisfying. She’d yell and scream and…” He gestured vaguely in the air.

“And it made you feel seen?” Patrick guessed. 

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“David, your dad sees you and he loves you. Regardless of the past, you’ve got a good relationship with him now. There’s no reason to have any regrets.”

“I just… I wasted a lot of years not appreciating him. Even after we ended up here, I spent too much time resenting him, as if it was his fault that we lost everything. Resenting that he couldn’t fix it and save us.”

Patrick smirked and reached out for David’s hand. “Well, I’m glad for my sake that he didn’t do that.”

David laughed a little hiccupping laugh. “You’d probably be married to Rachel.”

“Or maybe some other hot guy in Schitt’s Creek would have caught my eye.” He pulled David into a hug.

“You’d be in a throuple with Stevie and Jake.”

“Ew, David,” Patrick said in his best Alexis impersonation, making David laugh again. Holding hands and making people laugh -- it was the job of the spouse in situations like this, he supposed. “Hey, can I tell you something?”

David pulled out of the embrace and gave him a curious glance. “Yeah?”

“The morning of the wedding, your dad came to talk to me.”

“Oh, God. What did he say?”

Patrick smirked. “He told me that when a man and another man love each other very much…” David looked suitably horrified, which made Patrick grin widely. “No, he didn’t say that. He wanted to talk to me about you.”

“And _what_… did he _say_?” David said with more emphasis on each word.

“He said that you were a lot like your mother. And that the key to staying happily married to your mother was enjoying the whirlwind.”

“Mmm. I’m a whirlwind, am I?”

“I mean, yeah, sometimes.” Patrick took David’s hand again. “A whirlwind I enjoy. Also, he said that seeing you happy with me and successful with the store was more than he could have hoped for, and it made him so happy and so proud that he could barely contain it.”

“Well, that’s… very sweet.” David’s eyes glassed over. “And he needs to be okay so I can tell him I love him and I’m proud of him too.”

Patrick tugged on David’s hand until their chests collided, and he wrapped his arms around his husband again. “He will. You will.”

~*~

It was the following day before Johnny’s children could really visit. The recovery nurse told them to limit visitors to the ICU, so when David accompanied his sister back to the hospital, their partners stayed at home. Moira had spent a good bit of time with Johnny that morning, and Stevie was finally driving her home for much needed rest. Alexis had been impatient to get to the hospital today but now she moved haltingly, as if she could put off acceptance of what had happened through delay. David understood her hesitancy -- he shared it -- but he took her hand and led her into the room anyway.

The tubes and wires bristling around the bed made their father look small and drawn and weak, but at least the intubation tube David had caught a glimpse of when Johnny was freshly out of surgery had been removed from his throat, and he looked moderately alert.

“Hi, kids,” he said, offering them a smile. His voice sounded scratchy and his skin was pale, but otherwise David thought he looked pretty good for someone who’d had his chest opened up the day before.

“Hi, Dad,” Alexis said, shifting from foot to foot by his bedside. David went and got her a chair, encouraging her to sit and electing to stand behind her, using Alexis as a shield from the reality of his father in a hospital bed. 

“I hope you weren’t too worried about me. It’ll take more than that to take Johnny Rose down,” he said, all false bravado and cheer.

“You had a heart attack, Dad; of course we were worried,” Alexis said.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Johnny said, waving away their concerns with a hand, an IV coming out of the top of it. 

“Ted sends his best wishes,” Alexis said, then glanced up at David. “And Patrick.” 

“Yes,” David agreed, nodding, his mind suddenly blank of any of the things he’d wanted to say.

“Do you need us to bring you anything? Clothes? Some magazines?” asked Alexis.

“Stevie’s taking care of it. Just…” He gestured to them. “Come here and let me look at the two of you.”

“Daaaad,” Alexis protested, but she scooted her chair closer. David moved around and perched on the edge of the hospital bed, cautious not to jostle his father too much.

They made small talk for several minutes -- about their jobs and homes and lives, nothing about how scared they had been. How it had made David think hard about what losing his father would feel like. How he’d seen his mother’s worry and spiraled into thoughts about what losing Patrick would feel like. How he’d woken up from a nightmare of that very thing last night and had pressed himself against his sleeping husband’s back, heart hammering as he squeezed his eyes shut and repeated to himself that it wasn’t real.

When Alexis excused herself to use the bathroom, David’s silence became obvious, and he groped around for something to say.

“You know,” Johnny said, “When I was being prepped for surgery yesterday, I couldn’t help but think about what would happen to you all if I didn’t make it through.”

David shook his head quickly. “You don’t need to talk about that.”

“There would have been a time that I’d have worried about what would become of all of you without me.” Johnny leaned back against his pillows, eyes closing. “I don’t have to worry about that anymore. You’re all so capable and well-loved and well-taken care of. And you take care of each other.” He sighed, seemingly exhausted by the short visit. “I don’t have to worry.”

“Of course you don’t have to worry, but also you’re going to be with us for a good, long time,” David said, wanting to reach out and touch his father but afraid of hurting him, or dislodging is IV. His hand instead fluttered uselessly above the bedspread. “Dad…”

“Yes, David?”

He swallowed against a big lump in his throat. “You know I love you, right?”

Johnny Rose smiled widely. “Yes I do, son. Yes I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me at unfolded73.tumblr.com


End file.
